UNDP in Cambodia

HDR Analysis on Cambodia

Summary of the Analysis

The concept of human development entails freeing and enlarging people’s choices within a society. In principle, these choices could be infinite, but there are three essential elements.

People should:

- lead longer and healthier lives (life expectancy at birth);

- attain knowledge (expected and mean years of schooling); and

- acquire the resources necessary to provide for a decent standard of living (purchasing power parity, income).

The human development paradigm goes beyond these to also include such diverse choices as political, economic and social freedom, opportunities for people to be creative and productive, and to live with dignity. The essence of human development is to strengthen people’s capacities and options for livelihood, and to create an enabling environment for it.

Presented in this leaflet is an abstract of the 2013 Human Development Report on Cambodia’s performance on key indices of human development. It is to underscore the progresses in key human development indices and draw attentions to inequalities that potentially restricts and or undo human development progresses achieved over the last two decades or longer. In short, it is a brief account on Cambodia’s HDI/IHDI, Gender Inequality Index (GII), Multi-dimensional Poverty Index (MPI) and concluding remarks based on the 2013 Human Development Report.